I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.
I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave.
What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly.
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it – that is what you must do.
To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering – that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
Two and two make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.
But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.
What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.
For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.
I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn’t suffered.
I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory .
My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.